JOHN DONNE,
RICHARD CRASHAW, AND THE MYSTERY OF GOD’S GRACE
by R.V. Young
About twenty years ago, when someone decided that the papers at the annual
conventions of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars had been too heavily weighted
with theology and philosophy, I was invited to speak on the subject of
literature. For some perverse reason that now escapes my memory, I decided to
give a talk on the influence of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction on literary
study, thereby increasing the quotient of philosophy. Had I been warned in
advance that the late G.E.M. Anscombe would be in the audience, I undoubtedly
would have found a safer topic. Anscombe was one of the most profound and acute
philosophical minds of the twentieth century, and I had visions of making some
grotesque, amateurish blunder and being subjected to the intellectual equivalent
of going through a paper shredder. When the talk was over, the lady who had
invited me to the conference introduced me to Professor Anscombe and asked her
what British philosophers thought of Derrida. After distinguishing him from
Louis Althusser (“Is he the one who murdered his wife?”), Anscombe replied, “We
don’t think much about him at all.” While I consoled myself by thinking that at
least I had not committed a glaring logical fallacy, the other lady informed
Professor Anscombe that a colleague and I had just founded the John Donne
Journal. Professor Anscombe fixed me with a steely gaze: “Henry Donne, his
brother, was a martyr, but John Donne was an apostate! We don’t like him very
much at all.”
I got over it, eventually. But the apostasy of John Donne and its impact on the
English recusant community have remained for me a compelling topic for
reflection. John Donne (1572-1631) is among the very greatest devotional writers
of both prose and verse in an age of great religious poetry and meditative
literature; he is among the greatest English preachers in an age of great
sermons. The tone and texture of his divine poems and prose meditations are far
more Catholic than Protestant, and Donne was a life-long enemy of the Puritans
who were the most vigorously Protestant party in the Church of England in the
seventeenth century. Given his intensely Catholic background and his ambivalent
attitude toward Protestantism, Donne provides an illuminating angle on the
situation of Catholic recusants in Reformation England and a poignant reminder
of the mysterious ways of Our Lord in the provision of grace.
Donne’s younger and less well-known contemporary, the poet Richard Crashaw
(1612/13-1649), highlights the issue by furnishing an example of the process in
reverse. Crashaw’s father William was a militantly anti-papist preacher and
controversialist. The guardians of his son, who was orphaned as a small child,
for some reason sent him to schools where he came under the influence of the
growing high-church party, whose most prominent member was Charles I’s
Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. In the wake of the Puritan victory in
the British Civil War, Richard Crashaw would find his way into the Catholic
Church. Contemplating these two “Metaphysical” poets, who made opposing choices
regarding the most important decision a man can make, Catholics today may wish
to consider what human factors influence such choices, while remembering that
the final outcome, for each of us, results from a convergence of our wills and
the mystery of divine Providence.
Donne describes himself as “being derived from such a stock and race, as I
believe, no family, (which is not of far larger extent, and greater branches,)
hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the
Teachers of Roman Doctrine, than it hath done.” Donne’s father and much of his
father’s family were staunch Catholics, and his mother was the grand niece of no
less a figure than St. Thomas More. As Donne further remarks, his defection from
Catholicism was not easy, “for I was first to blot out certain impressions of
the Roman religion, and to wrestle both against the examples and against the
reasons by which some hold was taken and some anticipations early laid upon my
conscience, both by persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my
will, and others who by their learning and good life seemed to me justly to
claim an interest for the guiding and rectifying of mine understanding in these
matters.” The source of these words is bound to make any Catholic shudder: they
come from the preliminary material to Donne’s first publication, Pseudomartyr
(1610), in which he seeks to recommend himself to the patronage of King James I
by arguing that recusants who suffer for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance
to the British Sovereign are not true martyrs because they are adhering to the
Pope’s political power, not to a genuine religious principle.
It is almost impossible to say with certainty when Donne definitely abandoned
the Catholic faith of his boyhood, but there are interesting markers, personal
and literary, along the way. Sometime in the mid-1590s, perhaps as late as 1596
or 1597, Donne composed his third satire with its defiant plea for the rights of
individual conscience:
Keep the truth which thou hast found; men do not stand
In so ill case here, that God hath with his hand
Sign’d Kings blank charters to kill whom they hate,
Nor are they Vicars, but hangmen to Fate.
Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soul be tied
To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried
At that last day? Oh, will it then boot thee
To say a Philip, or a Gregory,
A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this? (ll. 89-97)
The poem thus deprecates the religious authority of Catholic champions like
Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIV, as well as the Protestant heroes Henry
VIII and Martin Luther. In an age when religious dissent—in Catholic and
Protestant countries alike—could mean the rack, the stake, or the gallows, these
were bold words indeed—so bold that they circulated only in manuscript and never
saw print until 1633, two years after Donne’s death.
An eloquent assertion of individual religious integrity in the face of state
persecution, Satire III may also reflect the poet’s own dilemma. Blessed with
extraordinary gifts of intellect and imagination, Donne was a restless,
discontented spirit, lured by the promise of the very “preferment” that he
scorned with vehement wit in many of his poems—a position of importance in the
royal court that condemned his Church and persecuted his family. By 1597 Donne
had to be at least an outwardly conforming member of the Church of England,
since he was employed by Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord High Keeper of the Privy Seal,
the highest judicial official in Queen Elizabeth’s government. Ironically, Sir
Thomas himself had once been a Catholic recusant and had exchanged a life of
persecution and deprivation for a position of power and prestige. By means of
the same compromise, Donne seemed well on his way along the Elizabethan cursus
honorum. But the irony deepens. As Egerton’s private secretary, Donne was living
in his employer’s impressive London establishment at York House, where he met
and fell in love with Anne More, the niece of Egerton’s second wife. In December
of 1601 the couple eloped when the seventeen-year-old Anne was, in all
likelihood, already pregnant. Even though Donne’s reluctant father-in-law, Sir
George More, was eventually reconciled to the match, Donne’s worldly prospects
were ruined. With his recusant background and reputation as a rake, he already
suffered liabilities, and an illicit marriage destroyed such reputation for
reliability as he may have won. In the words of a contemporary diarist, John
Manningham, “Donne is undone; he was lately secretary to the Lord Keeper, and
cast off because he would match himself to a gentlewoman against his Lord’s
pleasure.”
The romantic thrill of a secret marriage to a teenage bride soon gave way to the
everyday realities of genteel poverty, joblessness, a growing family, and
sporadic efforts to win the favor and patronage of a number of aristocratic
lords and ladies. Pseudo-Martyr was the most elaborate of these efforts, and it
succeeded in catching the eye of King James I, to whom it was dedicated. The
result, however, was not altogether what Donne had hoped. James, who fancied
himself a theologian, was impressed by the wit and learning of the anti-Catholic
Catholic polemicist and decided that his best contribution would be to enhance
the intellectual credibility of the clergy of the Church of England. Having
finally won the favorable attention of the King, Donne found every avenue to
preferment blocked except in the Church. After several desperate attempts to
secure the patronage of other important men in the realm, Donne finally
succumbed and, somewhat reluctantly, took holy orders in the Church of England
five years later.
Donne’s situation highlights the anxieties and sufferings overcome by Catholic
recusants who remained faithful and by converts during the reigns of Elizabeth
and James. We may surmise that any doubts Donne may have still entertained about
religion were summarily dismissed by his responsibility to his staunchly
Protestant bride and their growing family. “If any man come to me, and hate not
his father and mother and wife and children and sisters, yea and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). This is among the hardest of the
hard sayings, and Donne’s situation shows us just how gravely and literally it
may be intended. The poet’s circumstances were not, however, unique: few of the
recusant families enjoyed perfect unanimity, and many were racked by discord.
Yet heroes of faith and endurance emerged from these tensions. The poet and
martyr St. Robert Southwell, for example, grew up on a prosperous estate
acquired by his grandfather through the dissolution of the English monasteries;
the sister of a Catholic man who sought to aid Southwell betrayed him to the
royal authorities. John Donne’s brother Henry, regarded by Professor Anscombe
and many others as a martyr, died of the plague in Newgate, where he had been
imprisoned for harboring a Jesuit priest who was himself hanged, drawn, and
quartered for treason. Fewer than two decades later, John Donne wrote in
disparagement of Catholic martyrdom.
One may wonder if Donne was ever quite comfortable with his change of religion.
While it is always dubious to draw specific inferences about a poet’s life from
his poems, we may say with certainty that Donne experienced imaginatively at
least a fear of not attaining saving grace that required intensely violent
imagery for its expression:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
In a sonnet written several years after he had taken holy orders in the Church
of England, he openly questions the identity of the true church: “Show me, dear
Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear.” Another late sonnet perhaps sums up the
essential Donne as well as any of his poems:
Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows and in devotion.
It seems that Donne, along with men like Hooker, Andrewes, and Laud, helped to
devise the Anglican via media in order to accommodate his own uncertainties.
When Richard Crashaw came along a generation later, he was initially at ease in
that “middle way.” However, his discovery of the works of the great Spanish
mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, in the late 1630s drew him like a magnet toward the
Church that had proclaimed her sanctity. The collapse of the Church of England
with the Puritan victory in the civil war of the 1640s drove Crashaw into exile,
and in 1646 he was received by the Catholic Church and ordained a priest. It is
not true, as some have alleged, that Crashaw only became a Catholic because of
the Puritans’ temporary dismantling of the Church of England. His Cambridge
colleague and close friend, Joseph Beaumont, who shared Crashaw’s love of
liturgical ritual and his devotion to St. Teresa, remained a staunch Anglican
till the end of his days. A surviving letter of Crashaw’s to a member of the
Anglican religious community, founded by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding (and
celebrated by T.S. Eliot in the last of the Four Quartets) reveals the poet’s
anguish and uncertainty about the prospect of conversion to Rome. Even the
community at Little Gidding, where Crashaw had visited and had many friends, was
firmly anti-Catholic despite being dismissed by Puritans as an “Arminian
nunnery.” For Crashaw, becoming a Catholic meant estrangement from his friends
and permanent exile from England. Finally, at least one of his poems, a verse
epistle to the Countess of Denbigh urging her conversion, evinces the poet’s
clear understanding of the doctrinal differences between Catholics and
Protestants on the issue of grace.
What deceives critics about the rigor of Crashaw’s understanding is the
childlike innocence and joy of much of his most inspired devotional poetry.
Although he deploys “metaphysical conceits” in the manner of Donne—witty,
striking metaphors involving complex analogies—Crashaw’s tone is radiant and
expansive rather than tense and introspective. His celebration of Christmas in
the “Hymn in the Holy Nativity” manifests an awareness of the paradox of the
Incarnation, but does not forget the Baby:
Proud world, said I; cease your contest
And let the MIGHTY BABE alone.
The Phoenix builds the Phoenix’ nest.
Love’s architecture is his own.
The BABE whose birth embraves this morn,
Built his own bed e’re he was born.
Although Donne’s religious poetry does not fail to acknowledge the role of the
Blessed Virgin, one cannot imagine anything in his poetry like Crashaw’s tender
depiction of the Virgin and Child:
No no, your King’s not yet to seek
Where to repose his Royal Head.
See see, how soon his new-bloomed Cheek
Twixt mother’s breasts is gone to bed.
Sweet choice, said we! No way but so
Not to lie cold, yet sleep in snow.
Where Donne’s most characteristic religious poems dramatize anxiety about the
poetic speaker’s sinfulness and his longing for grace, Crashaw’s trademark theme
is self-abandonment to mystical rapture as in this astonishing apostrophe to St.
Teresa at the close of “The Flaming Heart”:
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of Lights and Fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled Bowls of fierce desire
By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized by parting Soul, and sealed thee His;
By all the heavens thou hast in Him
(Fair sister of the Seraphim!)
By all of Him we have in Thee;
Leave nothing of my Self in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die.
Merely reading the saint’s autobiography is sufficient inspiration for the poet
likewise to throw himself into the arms of Christ.
Richard Crashaw spent his last years in exile on the Continent in very
straitened circumstances. He died of a fever on the way to take up his duties as
a canon of the Santa Casa at Loreto, reputed to be the house in which the
Blessed Virgin was born, transported to Italy by angels. His last poetry, all
religious in theme, expresses devotional fervor, firm conviction, and humble
assurance of the favor of Christ. For him, death was a longed-for joining with
his Savior. At the time of his death, John Donne was the eminent Dean of St.
Paul’s Cathedral, apparently on the short list of candidates for the next vacant
bishopric in the Church of England. His final and most famous sermon, Death’s
Duel, in which he preached, according to his first biographer, Isaac Walton, his
own funeral sermon, is a meditation on the terrors of death. “Make no ill
conclusions,” Donne urges, “upon any man’s loathness to die, for the mercies of
God work momentarily in minutes, and many times insensibly to bystanders or any
other than the party departing.” And of course, he is right: we have neither
means nor authorization to judge the spiritual state of another man. We may
infer, however, that Crashaw was far more at ease in his conscience than Donne
upon departing this world, without presuming to speculate about the eternal
destiny of either. Donne is undoubtedly the greater poet, and his intensely
dramatic, anxiously fearful religious poetry probably speaks more directly to
the spiritual experience of most of us than the paradoxical tranquility of
Crashaw’s passionate rapture. Yet one would more readily envy the profound
serenity lying behind Crashaw’s poetry than the melancholy anguish that
motivated Donne.
R.V. Young is Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and
co-founder and co-editor of the John Donne Journal. His most recent book is
Doctrine and Devotion in 17th-Century Poetry, which provides detailed
discussions of the religious poetry of Donne and Crashaw.
